Burn Out Bright
by ag-sasami
Summary: A series of drabbles exploring the darker, more elusive bits of the series. Hanna-centric. Roughly inspired by Switchfoot's song of the same title.
1. Fire In You

**Fire In You**

He knew which spell she wanted before she told him to start drawing. It was just an _awful_ idea, but Sassy Bat wasn't really giving him any other options. So the redhead went about putting the runes on the floor in long sweeping strokes and sharp lines and whorls, growing ever more wary and bracing for its backlash. Just a few final tense marks…

It was electricity and heat and intensely purple light so, so suddenly; all burning scars and fire in his chest and violent contorting in the pit of him. Hanna choked back the ohgodohgod_ohgod_ rising panicky in his lungs as the purple rune light peaked and dimmed. The magic ebbed away from the room but his blood was boiling in his skin hothot and painful and roaring through his brain and pulsing through his quaking bones and something bitter was rising up on the tail of the panic. He brought a hand to his face to steady the spin of the walls and the swell of the floor, body shuddering under the pain and stress of holding him upright on three limbs.

_Ohgodohgodohgodohgod_. There was just so, so much blood, acrid and metallic in his nose and his mouth and thick in the back of his throat. And the room was still spinning too close(_way_ too close) to Hanna's face as everything went dark and his elbows buckled beneath him.

_

* * *

The future is a question mark  
Of kerosene and electric sparks  
There's still fire in you yet  
Yeah there's still fire in you!_


	2. Discontented Down here

**Discontented Down Here**

When he lived alone Hanna would scream shrill and bloodcurdling.

At night he watches his parents die in graphic detail overandoverandover again. He wakes with ice in his veins, howling into the darkness. He shakes hysterically and grasps at his thin sheets unable to clear the blood-spattered visions from his head. Those are the easy nights; at least he gets some sleep.

Most nights though, his screaming wakes the neighbors. His abdomen is poorly held together, and his scars refused to heal; his breathing pulls the staples at odd angles and when he drifts off to fitful sleep he can't keep inhaling shallow and measured. Instead his breaths grow deep and steady and _ohsopainful_ as his body tears itself slowly apart. Skin pulls sharply in all the wrong directions, squeezing the breath from him in a violent wail. And he gasps and the staples just dig in again and _fuck_.

Scream.

Gasp.

Swear.

Repeat until dawn.

Now Gallahad sits at the foot of the bed most nights. The nightmares have slowed. When they do come there is a warm orange glow and a hand on his shoulder, and for the first time in his life the bloody visions fade into inky black sleep again. But nothing stays the pain that rips through him (not even Worth's drugs), and Gallahad already worries too much without Hanna crying out like the dying. So now the nights spent screaming are spent staring at the ceiling, counting cracks and grinding his teeth until his jaw aches and the sun rises.

*~*_  
I'm still discontented down here  
I'm still discontented_


	3. The Obvious

**The Obvious**

The day had brutalized him. Spectral burns from the runes left his torso raw and ablaze and every heartbeat was pulsing magic-tainted blood slowly through his veins. This time, "I'm okay" meant being doubled over on hands and knees on the shower floor retching black and toxic until his insides heaved dry. It meant sitting back in the blood-swirled water with knees pulled to his chest, sobbing silently for the overwhelming pain. It meant shaking for just a little longer than usual under the scalding water because in five years no one else had seen his scars but Doc Worth.

Now too suddenly there are these probing, insistent questions and concerned, unblinking orange stares over secrets he's never had to divulge. And even though someone now sits at the foot of his bed every night and makes him breakfast every morning, he still feels so, so alone. It's _his_ pain and _his_ memories and no one can make those things go away, and no one has the right or responsibility to share that burden. So he smiles large and false and evasive, and {…} knows he's lying (Hanna can tell) but he lies anyway, keeping his constant companion at arm's length. "I'm fine" is an abrupt wall between Hanna and the things he wants, in a space he's never had to fill with lies.

It was better when no one knew; when his loneliness was less isolating, less confusing.

_

* * *

We were young and the world was clear  
But young ambition disappears__  
I swore it would never come to this  
The average, the obvious_


	4. Running the Wrong Way

**Running the Wrong Way**

If he tries hard enough sometimes he can remember what his mother smells like, or the way his father used to carry him on his shoulders. He avoids it all the same, because memories of his parents bring memories of their deaths and of all the ways his life is barely held together. Worth and Lamont have stood in as a surrogate, half-hearted family for him for the last few years; while he trusts them, it's not something innate, just that they're reliable and ideally aloof. Hanna doesn't want to be someone else's responsibility, and he especially does not want to be attached to anyone in any real, familial way.

But when someone says 'good night' as he falls asleep at the end of each day and each morning he wakes to the sizzle of bacon, it feels real and right and altogether horrifying. And the unavoidable conclusion in Hanna's head is that the zombie is already kin. The words string themselves together wrong when he tries to spell out an explanation, and he finds the need to not be so close and the desire to remain detached are all too frequently tangled up in something that looks like gratitude and security.

The right words to tell his partner just how much he wants him to leave (and just how relieved he is that he's stayed) don't exist in even the remotest sense. It's like he has a family again. There is no _trying_ to remember the dusty smell of his friend or the strength of dead arms dragging him to safety because those things are still very much real. And really, how do you tell someone they're the best and worst thing that's happened to you in recent memory? How do you express the need for something that feels like home when that is categorically the _last_ thing you're ready to accept. Suddenly he's so close to something that feels like complete happiness that he doesn't know how he could go back to living with the empty space it filled. He wants it so, so badly, but he hates that needy pang in his chest even more intensely.

The circumstances of the {…}'s unlife are ambiguous, and the loss of one family is already too much to bear in a lifetime. So Hanna finds himself hoping to wake up alone and without the looming threat of loss, all at once terrified that day is approaching faster than he can reasonably be prepared to face.

_

* * *

Limping through this human race  
You bite and claw your way back home  
But you're running the wrong way_


End file.
